Exordium -- Potentiality and gesture. Revision, origin, and the courage of truth : Henry James's New York Edition prefaces -- "First love" : gesture and the emergence of desire in Eudora Welty -- Novels and the beginnings of character. Robinson Crusoe and the inception of speech -- The clock finger at nought : Daniel Deronda and the positing of perspective -- Proto-reading and the positing of character in Our mutual friend -- Our stony ancestry. Ovid and Orpheus -- Wallace Stevens and the temporalities of inception and embodiment -- Solitude and queer origins. "Epitaph, the idiom of man" : imaginings of the beginning -- Etiology, solitude, and queer incipience.